In recent years, the South African government has championed the continued decline of rhino poaching in the Kruger National Park, the country’s largest wildlife sanctuary and a habitat for many of these iconic horned mammals.
But a new study, published Friday in Science Advances, suggests there may be more to the story. Using mathematical models, researchers found that the decline in poaching incidents may be due to an unfortunate fact: fewer rhinos.
The low population density makes poaching more difficult because rhinos are simply harder to track, the researchers found. But demand for rhino horn on the illegal wildlife market remains consistently high, and so does overall poaching activity in the Kruger, the study concludes, despite anti-poaching measures. Climate change, meanwhile, could wreak further havoc.
The problem of poaching: White and black rhinos are among the largest land animals on Earth. Male white rhinos can be 12 feet long and about 5,000 pounds as adults. But the Kruger National Park covers 2 million hectares of land – about the same size as Israel. With only around 10,000 white rhinos left in all of South Africa, finding these ungulates in the park is more difficult than one might think.
Poachers often spend days searching for a rhino to kill for its horn, according to the study’s lead author, Jasper Eikelboom.
“There’s no way poachers can find almost all the rhinos and kill them… because it’s getting harder and harder to find them,” Eikelboom, an ecologist at Wageningen University in Netherlands.
Here’s why poachers don’t give up: A rhino horn — made of keratin, similar to human fingernails — can sell for $40,000 or more on the illegal black market. Most of the demand comes from Southeast Asia and China, where some people buy rhino horns as a status symbol or use them in traditional medicines.
“Looking for a few days [or] a couple of weeks is still worth it because there is a huge profit margin,” said Eikelboom. Over the past few decades, the South African government has implemented a variety of strategies to combat this illegal activity, from pairing teams of rangers with dog patrol units to dehorning rhinos in the Kruger.
While South Africa has seen a modest decline in rhino poaching incidents across the Kruger in recent years, Eikelboom and his co-author, Herbert Prins, another ecologist at Wageningen University, wanted to determine whether part of the reason for the decline was the smallest group of animals to hunt. To do this, they used a model that calculated how far poachers moved on average from 2007 to 2022 to find a rhino in the context of declining rhino densities.
Their data shows that poaching activity has remained relatively stable as rhino populations have declined, despite stricter anti-poaching measures.
“We have to look at the relative numbers, like [many rhinos] are being killed on a percentage basis instead of an absolute number,” Eikelboom said.
The research shows that anti-poaching efforts have not been strong enough to prevent population declines, the authors say, because illegal hunting activity should have declined no matter what.
“It’s a fantastic first step in trying to quantify the issue and then raise hypotheses for others to test,” said Dave Balfour, an independent conservation ecologist who was not involved in the study. Balfour chairs the African Rhinoceros Specialist Group of the African Species Survival Commission of the non-profit International Union for the Conservation of African Species. “Conserving rhinos in an area the size of Kruger, which is huge, is ideal for every purpose other than the security needs of the species, and that’s because it’s extremely difficult to secure an area that size.”
However, Balfour sees limitations with some of the paper’s assumptions. His model follows the premise that many poachers are looking for rhinos without much information about where to look, and that these “naive” poachers have to travel an average distance before stumbling upon one.
“I’m not sure there is such a thing as a naive poacher. Almost every incident of poaching relies on some form of internal collusion corruption,” Balfour said. “So how naive these poachers are is highly debatable, and whether rhinos are widely, evenly distributed across the landscape , as I read in the newspaper, is also controversial.”
Dangers from all sides: Rhino conservation is an extremely complex issue in South Africa. Many of the communities around Kruger and other rhino habitats are impoverished and the unemployment rate in the country exceeds 30 percent. Experts say these conditions are often why individuals can risk dangerous encounters with wildlife or a 25-year prison sentence to track rhino horns. While poaching incidents are down in Kruger, they rose in the country overall last year, with 499 rhinos killed—51 more than in 2022, the BBC reports.
Rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall due to climate change could soon compound the problem, according to a study published in January. Rhino skin has very few sweat glands. This makes animals particularly sensitive to heat because they cannot cool off on a hot day by sweating like humans. Instead, they should consume plenty of water or seek shade to prevent heat stress. But the study found that climate change is likely to push rhinos to the upper threshold of the heat they can handle and will require them to travel greater distances to access watering holes.
“Wildlife, and even humans, have to travel farther and farther to find water, and that means that … the risk of poaching, the risk of habitat destruction or other kinds of interactions, will start to increase, ” study author Timothy Randhir, a. ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told me.
He and the other authors say the South African government could plant more trees and add watering holes to the landscape to help minimize these interactions and provide cooling spaces for the rhinos. However, the hunting issue will not be easy to solve. As the South African government continues to invest in anti-poaching measures, poachers are creating innovative strategies to overcome them, Bloomberg reports.
In the long term, Eikelboom and co-authors of the poaching study write, reducing demand for rhino horn will allow these mammals to “safely roam the vast African savannas again.” Meanwhile, they say smaller, better-monitored “safe havens” for wildlife beyond Kruger will be crucial.
More Top Climate News
In California, regulators approved rules Thursday to protect workers from rising indoor temperatures as a heat wave rattles states across the East Coast and Midwest.
The regulation from the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health will require employers in indoor industrial buildings to provide cool areas for workers when temperatures reach 82 degrees Fahrenheit.
If temperatures exceed 87 degrees, employers should ensure that the entire work space is cooled and provide more breaks or change workers’ schedules. However, Associated Press reporter Dorany Pineda noted that the rules will not cover employees in state correctional facilities.
“These workers are at risk of heat exhaustion and dehydration due to working in often archaic, poorly ventilated buildings with little protection from the temperatures and this will only get worse in the coming years,” AnaStacia Nicol Wright, policy manager with the workers’ rights organization Worksafe. told the AP.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented number of mosquitoes are testing positive for West Nile virus around Las Vegas, NBC News reports. A growing body of research has found that climate change is expanding the geographic range of some insects – and the diseases they carry. Experts say the current situation in Las Vegas is just another example of this phenomenon.
Mosquitoes typically thrive in hot, humid places, Nischay Mishra, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, told NBC News. “But in Nevada, as smaller bodies of water dry up, they create shallow waters that are ideal for mosquito breeding.”
In other news, ProPublica’s Lisa Song (an ICN alum) wrote one lying piece about how a chemical plastic recycling technique known as pyrolysis doesn’t actually produce much recycled plastic. My colleague Jim Bruggers has reported extensively on chemical recycling mistakes in the past if you want to dive deeper.
Kiley Price
journalism
Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a special interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s Today’s Climate newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news every week.
She received her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow who spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
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